プロジェクト: The Girl Locked Below

大希望を持つ翻訳者のCurbehです。よろしくお願いします。

音楽大好きですけれど、意外と難しいですね、歌詞を作るのは...　

一応、音楽の歌詞を作っているから、普通の翻訳の仕事みたいにしたら...つまらない歌詞を作ってしまいます。頭の中に絵を描くのには日本語はすばらしいですが、まだまだ未熟私にはちょっと大変です。アフロを引っ張るまで考えないといけません...

Kurushiiと一緒にVOCALOIDの曲を作るの二回目でした。一回目のmasqueradeと違って、Stokholmの作詞がほぼ一日をかけてしました。

Kurushiiと曲の歌詞を作ることはちょっと変わっています。まずはKurushiiがBGMと英語版の歌詞を作詞します。英語版についているのは音節の数です。日本語に直すときにはそれに合わせないと、いい歌詞を考えても、作り直すしかありません。そこがたぶん一番難しいです。

英語版から離れてもいいですが、もともとの意味とイメージに同調することが大事です。歌詞を作るときには、やはりイメージされたキャラクターのしゃべり方、考え方、そのキャラクター自体を歌詞に映りたいですね。今回はいわゆる洗脳された抹殺ドール、と言うイメージが出てほしかったです。　可愛いけどご主人様に一歩近づいたら新しい口をあいてあげるタイプです。今は満足ですけど、もっと改良で来るところはあるはずです。

和訳した後、Kurushiiと一緒にイメージが持つかどうか確認して、発音の調整してからやっと絵を加えてアップロードします。今回の絵は友達にやってもらって、結構合うと思います。

またこんな歌をやったら、より強い言葉が使いたいですね。イメージがと浮かびやすい単語を使いこなしたいです。

Projects: Arcana Heart 3 Information Pages

Yes. All of them.

In order to help usher a fresh anime game in with information for its would be players, I translated a fan made information page for Arcana Heart 3. This was back in 2010. I used Adobe Dreamweaver to directly edit the HTML and it was hosted on Mizuumi. The pages were made by Canon. An avid combo-video creator for games like Arcana Heart and Melty Blood.

This was not a particularly hard project at the time since I had a fair amount of experience translating fighting game material related items before. What was a challenge was the shear amount of stuff. The game has 23 characters... and the same number of Arcana with individual information of their own. I had a little bit of help, but it took a fair amount of time to finish. Canon would later update the page with links to combo-video combos, but they were left out of the translation since it wouldn't help players in the US much.

There was not too much to research in terms of the actual content. He mostly talks about how the moves work and important data surrounding them. If I did have to look up something, I'd check the Japanese wiki and BBS for supplemental information.
The bulk of my research was brought on by myself...

Fairly easy if you know FG terminology.

The game uses a lot of foreign languages for its move names. From Italian to German, Russian to Icelandic... Even some Latin is thrown in there! I took it upon myself to find translations for these moves AND keep the original language intact.

"But wait, I thought you only know Japanese and English?"

That's right. That's why it took forever to cross reverence pronunciations guides and charts or find Japanese sites with information/translations that match the corresponding katakana. From there, I could then translate it into English that reflects the original meaning.

AltusUSA did the original Arcana Heart... They did a good job but I felt that it could have reflected the original names more. The creators went through all of the trouble to use over eight different languages for their moves. I thought it would be nice to introduce them to the player. For things that would require heavier research, they used an appropriate sounding name or the Japanese for the move. There is nothing wrong with that, but its not as thorough as I would like have things.

Russian and Icelandic were the hardest

Other than that, it went pretty smoothly. The most graphical editing I would need to do was the short comic on the front page. Easy. This is the kind of work I want to take care of and incorporate in my company. If I did this again... I would definitely like to work with professionals from other languages for even better translations. I would like to reflect the original while still having it accessible. I would also like to make the page even better, better than the original.

Also, I did ask Canon if it was OK to translate the page. He was delighted to hear that people overseas were interested in Arcana Heart 3 and wanted to use his page. That kind of thing makes me the happiest.

Projects: Melty Blood

I started doing some of the character stories mostly due to wanting know what was going on myself. I would definitely say that I was not as experienced with translating or even Japanese at the time. It took a significant amount of time and guidance do these at first, but I was satisfied with the results. After translating them, I posted a recording from the PS2 version of Melty Blood and used annotations. As I got better at it, I was able to use more complex software for the subtitles, and it became less time consuming to simply translate the Japanese. I could focus more on the individuality of the characters.

Characters are hard to translate. You cannot just translate what is being said, you have to "translate the character."  You need a good idea of "who this person is" when you translate dialog. Dialog is not static. We all have individuality and experiences that change who we are. This of course influences how we talk in general and even how we talk to certain people. There are over 30 individual characters in Melty Blood, and most of them vary in how they talk and act when alone and with others. What is harder is translating characters that are well known in their respective communities. Melty Blood is based on a fairly popular visual novel, Tsukihime. I need to make sure that I also match the character's manner of dialog to the vision of what people already have and expect of them.

Calm down Matt

What I needed to keep in mind for most of these is, "how do people see this character already?" I can't have an established smooth talking, fancy characters talking like B-Boy from 5th street. It throws the reader off. Admittedly, this mistake is in a lot of my earlier work.

KnK reference to Sōren

On the subject of fancy, many character have highly embellished abstract speech models. I'll talk more about translating "complex/fantastic" works later, but the writers for Melty Blood, Type-Moon, often fall into this category. Japanese is a wonderful language for expressing feelings and imagery... and like a 2 frame mashable jab, they abuse the hell out it, for lack of better words. This poses a problem... how do I express these abstract visions in English? Thanks to this I feel I have a fair amount of experience with the kind of classic dialog found this type of media.

As for research, I needed to brush up on characters that I was not familiar with. I needed a good idea of their personality. I have a good idea about most characters, but I did need to have a look at some. For example, I needed to take a look at Kara no Kyōkai in order to understand some the references and Ryougi herself.

I think that these all went pretty well for the most part. I still cringe at some of my older work but I find them passable for the most part. I will definitely keep the personality and speaking habits of each character in mind should I do another one in the future. 

It's been a while since I've done a Melty Blood character story, but it's definitely on the list of things I would like to get to. My ultimate goal is a localized version, or at least fan translated version of MBAACC. We will see what happens from here though.

Projects

I have a nice PC setup now! 

To give more insight towards this "soul of a translator," I'm going to start posting about past projects and works. I'll talk about how they went, challenges, what kind of research I needed to do and my overall mindset from start to finish.

I doubt I can tell anyone "how" to translate, but I have high-standards for how translating, and a translator should be.

The ones in English will deal with Japanese to English translation. I'll also have English to Japanese translations, but the chances of those being in Japanese are higher.

I knew him well